Fresh tutorial on tkinter and ttk for Python 3
I recommend reading the documentation. It is simple and authoritative, and good for beginners.
I recommend the NMT Tkinter 8.5 reference.
- Themed widgets
- Customizing and creating ttk themes and styles
- Finding and using themes
- Using and customizing ttk styles
- The ttk element layer
The module names used in some examples are those used in Python 2.7.
Here's a reference for the name changes in Python 3: link
One of the conveniences of ttk is that you can choose a preexistingtheme,
which is a full set of Styles applied to the ttk widgets.
Here's an example I wrote (for Python 3) that allows you to select any available theme from a Combobox:
import random
import tkinter
from tkinter import ttk
from tkinter import messagebox
class App(object):
def __init__(self):
self.root = tkinter.Tk()
self.style = ttk.Style()
available_themes = self.style.theme_names()
random_theme = random.choice(available_themes)
self.style.theme_use(random_theme)
self.root.title(random_theme)
frm = ttk.Frame(self.root)
frm.pack(expand=True, fill='both')
# create a Combobox with themes to choose from
self.combo = ttk.Combobox(frm, values=available_themes)
self.combo.pack(padx=32, pady=8)
# make the Enter key change the style
self.combo.bind('<Return>', self.change_style)
# make a Button to change the style
button = ttk.Button(frm, text='OK')
button['command'] = self.change_style
button.pack(pady=8)
def change_style(self, event=None):
"""set the Style to the content of the Combobox"""
content = self.combo.get()
try:
self.style.theme_use(content)
except tkinter.TclError as err:
messagebox.showerror('Error', err)
else:
self.root.title(content)
app = App()
app.root.mainloop()
Side note: I've noticed that there is a 'vista' theme available when using Python 3.3 (but not 2.7).
I have found the TkDocs tutorial to be very useful. It describes building Tk
interfaces using Python and Tkinter
and ttk
and makes notes about differences between Python 2 and 3. It also has examples in Perl, Ruby and Tcl, since the goal is to teach Tk itself, not the bindings for a particular language.
I haven't gone through the whole thing from start to finish, rather have only used a number of topics as examples for things I was stuck on, but it is very instructional and comfortably written. Today reading the intro and first few sections makes me think I will start working through the rest of it.
Finally, it's current and the site has a very nice look. He also has a bunch of other pages which are worth checking out (Widgets, Resources, Blog). This guy's doing a lot to not only teach Tk, but also to improve people's understanding that it's not the ugly beast that it once was.